


The Reason for the Season

by Munnin



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternative version of Christian mythology, Blasphemous, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-09-26 08:37:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17138534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Munnin/pseuds/Munnin
Summary: The Christmas story tends to be a little more complicated if you know more of the facts.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of fiction and not intended to be offensive or derogatory.

I turned my collar up against the chill, trying to keep out the not quite snow, not quite rain. I was late to meet the boys from work for a beer but the window display of the charity shop caught my eye.

The words "The Reason for the Season" were hand painted across the window in an unsteady arch, a nativity scene set below them. It was a cobbled together set, no two figures quite the same scale, colour, or age.

How many cleared out attics and deceased estates had come together to make this scene? How many happy Christmases had all these figures seen?

The baby Jesus wasn't white at least. Even if the rest of the figures were. A middle eastern refugee, born in a hotel car-park. Or the time's equivalent anyway. 

I always wondered what became of that kid. Did he survive to adulthood? Did he become a carpenter like his father? Did he find love, have kids of his own, grow old? Was he happy?

Did he have any idea how his story would get mixed up, just because of a name?

I know he didn't die on the cross. That was another man. It wasn't a common name but an easy alias. 

The other Jesus had been a prankster, a lout getting drunk with his friends. He spent his days spouting philosophical bullshit and teasing the Roman authorities. 

At just over two and a half millennia old, he had been little more than a teenager by his own standards and acted like it. Not that anyone around him knew. He'd at least been smart enough to hide his nature. After what had happened in Sumer. But he'd been cocksure and careless, delighting in the sway he held over his friends and the officials alike. 

For him, the crucifixion had been little more than a slap on the wrist, meaning no more to him than getting busted for shop-lifting might. He’d waited three days in the hope the heat had died down and slunk off to start a new life somewhere else. 

I say he. Classic distancing language. I wish I could claim he was another person, someone whose regrets I didn’t have to shoulder but it would be a lie. I’ve had two millennia to witness the consequences of my childhood stunts. To watch myriad wonderful, colourful, complex religions and cultures be crushed under the juggernaut my cult became. Crusades and witch trials, persecutions and inquisitions. And I had given them the excuse. 

The reason for the season was a baby boy born in desperation and in hope. But his story had somehow become mixed up with mine and so ended with blood and regret.

Behind me a police car slowed down, the officer eyeing me harshly. A middle eastern man with a backpack, standing on a darkened street. I could almost feel his judgment like the sleet inching down the back of my collar. 

I tipped my hat politely and moved on, hoping he wouldn’t follow.

The pub was snug and warm, the blast of cheerful accordion from the corner helping to push back the darkness of my thoughts. I ran my hand over the low lintel as I came in, wondering if the scared old oak had seen the Romans come. 

They were waiting for me, my workmates. The assorted boffinary of Cambridge’s Archaeology department. They greeted me with a cheer and shuffled up to make room. 

I hadn’t planned to become an archaeological assistant. For someone like me, it’s a little gauche. And, if I’m being honest, my motives to begin with had not been entirely pure. I’d been studying at the university (my 32nd degree) when I heard of an expedition going to help recover artefacts from an earthquake-damaged site in Greece. I’d left a gift from a friend there a few thousand years earlier and was keen to get it back. 

Despite my complete lack of experience, my _gift_ for languages got me a foot in the door. After that, it was just a matter of being useful while hiding how well I knew my way around the once busy Roman port. 

I found I enjoyed the work and was soon offered an internship with the department. I couldn’t help but enjoy the company of the older scholars. The loving but often utterly incorrect way they described past civilisations was a source of endless entertainment to me. I only had a couple more years before I’d reach my seven-year limit and have to move on. Any more than that and people started to notice. I’d thought of moving on to another country, another university and keep studying archaeology but the industry was too small. Someone was bound to recognise me. Maybe in 50 years, when almost everyone at the table had died or moved on. 

Someone bumped my shoulder as I sat down, pushing a beer my way. “It’d be colder but you’re late.” A light wheat beer that reminded me of the Nile. 

“Sorry,” I answered, ducking my head as I unwound my scarf, “I was trying to finish my Christmas shopping.”

“Leaving it a little late, aren’t you?” one of the PhD students teased. “Or did you have to find just the right collar for your pussy cat.”

“Tease all you want,” I huffed, playing along with the joke. “Cat happens to be very particular about what she wears.” 

“Are you ever going to give that cat a name?”

I sipped my beer, smiling over the rim of the glass. “Only when she’s ready to tell me what it is.”

Cat had adopted me during a trip to Jerusalem and had more or less refused to leave again. Given I’d had her for over 70 years now, I had a feeling she wasn’t exactly your garden variety moggy. Which suited us both just fine. She’d been the most stable part of my life since- since…

No, not going there. Not even this time of year. 

“Are you sure you don’t want some of this mulled wine?” one of the girls called across the table, pouring from a steaming jug.

“Thank you, no,” I declined, clinging to my pint. “I don’t drink wine.”

“You just haven’t found the right wine, my lad,” one of the professors opined. “You really must come to the south of France with me next summer. I’ll see to it you get a proper education in wines.”

I’d spent a few good years in France before WWI, tending a small vineyard. But for all that, I couldn’t bring myself to drink wine. Not again. Not after that night. “It’s not that. Just… bad memories.”

“I hope they weren’t all bad.” 

The voice was sonorous and smooth, and painfully familiar even if I hadn’t heard it for almost a thousand years.

I looked up into his warm dark eyes and felt my heart clench. “Jud-” I cut myself off before reaching the second syllable of his name. Or at least the name I’d last known him by. 

“Well, Jon?” someone asked, “Are you going to introduce us to your friend?”

I cleared my throat, unsure I remembered how to form words.

He smiled and held a hand out to the nearest of my colleagues. “I’m Jude,” he rolled easily with the name I’d given, his accent ever so slightly American now. “Jon and I… go way back.”

I tried to get past feeling like a landed fish as everyone introduced themselves. “What are you- why are you here?”

He frowned at me and shook his head. “Did you think I’d let you be alone for Christmas? I know how you get this time of year.” 

But he didn’t mean year. He meant millennia. The second one since… since that last supper we shared. He’d turned up out of the blue last millennia too, in Constantinople. Arriving for Christmas and staying through to Easter. A time he knew would be hardest on me.

For all we’d been through, for all we’d done to each other, he always turned up when I needed him most. Even if I hadn’t realised I needed someone. 

He sat down next to me, hand brushing my sleeve as he accepted a glass of the mulled wine. There was a glint of colour at his wrist, warm against his ebony skin. A delicate fragment of something gold that wasn’t gold, set in a simple platinum band. 

Like mine, it had been set and reset a thousand times. Remade as the fashions changed. The fine and yet almost indestructible shards of the thing that had made us what we are. The pieces resonated, pulsing with something akin to a heartbeat now they were near each other again. He felt it too, reaching under the table to take my hand and stroke his long fingers over my palm.

Five and a half thousand years since we’d woken up naked, surrounded by shards of gold; with no memory of a time before that moment. Five and a half thousand years without a single moment of illness or aging and only the briefest brushes with death. 

In all the world, in all time, we were alone with a secret we could tell no other. 

In all the world, in all time, we had each other.

I let the banter of the pub wash over me. As always, he was quick to make friends and was telling some terrible half-truth about how we met. I closed my eyes and rested my head on his shoulder.

This year at least, the season would have a reason.


	2. The Night Before Christmas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon faces the consequences of the night before.

I drank steadily if quietly all that night. More than once I offered to get the next round in, just so I could sneak in a shot between ales. I needed time to process, to deal with memories Jude’s voice stirred up, the flush of warmth radiating from him as we sat side by side on the pub’s long benches. But I wasn’t ready for either. 

I’d been a loud drunk once, full of big ideas and sweeping lectures but those days were gone, along with the wine that had fuelled them. Beer made me mellow and reflective, a much safer and enjoyable state. But mixed with a couple of shots of gin or vodka (I don’t remember which now), I became quite and quietly morose. 

I don’t remember how I got home. I assume one of my colleagues put me in a cab but I woke up in my own bed, cursing the golden shards and every day of my long existence. 

It’s a quirk of my existence that, although I can heal from any injury and am proof against all disease, poison has a singularly insalubrious effect on me. 

Experimentation during my third century had taught me that though no amount of poison would be fatal, it would make me spectacularly ill. It was the only time I experienced sickness of any kind. Depending on the dose it could take days or weeks for the poison to leave my systems. 

All of which is to say, immortality aside, ethanol still affected me. And the hang-overs were truly awful. Another reason I didn’t drink much anymore. 

I curled tightly under my blankets, pulling the covers up over my head to shield my eyes from the dull but invasive sunlight. Cat bounced into the bed, loudly announcing her opinion regarding my current state. Or, more likely, the current state of her bowl. I doubt I thought to feed her last night. 

I cursed at her as she yowled, trying to push her off the bed without letting the stabbing light in.

“Did you just call her a Jezebel in Akkadian?” His deep voice, warm with amusement.

I groaned. I hadn’t realised anyone else was in the flat. Had he stayed the night? I curled tighter. He was in my flat. And in my head. Neither of which I knew how to deal with yet. 

Seeming to sense this, he put something down on my dresser. “There’s coffee, water too and some aspirin. I’m making breakfast but take your time.”

I waited till the sound of his footsteps retreated down stairs before I inched my way out from under the covers. 

The coffee smelt divine. Definitely not the cheap instant my kitchen contained yet it appeared in one of my mugs. 

Apparently, he’d come prepared. 

A few sips of coffee and the little white pills helped. Like poison, my body breaks down most medications slowly but as I so rarely need pain relief, they were quite effective nonetheless. No built-up tolerance. 

It took me some time to drag myself out of bed, across the landing and into the shower. I missed the social aspect of Roman bathhouses but I hold that indoor running hot water is one of man’s greatest achievements.

By the time I got out, the scent of spice was drifting up the narrow stairs of my flat. Not bothering to dress, I padded down to the kitchen in my pyjamas and robe. 

He took up most of my kitchenette, back muscles moving under a loose knit jumper, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. He wore his hair clipped short, groomed stubble, eyebrows shaped, and fingernails manicured. A very 21st century look. Metrosexual I think they call it. Or called it, past tense. Was the phrase still in use?

It only occurred to me as I watched him cook how desperately I missed the soft curls and the ornately braided beards of our youth. A look now only ever seen on the faces of Assyrian statuary.

He took something out of the oven and my mouth watered. Much to my surprise. I normally couldn’t eat the night after a bender but something about the smell of his cooking was reassuring. A favourite dish from so long ago I couldn’t remember its name. 

“I fed the cat. I hope that’s alright?” Cat wove her way between his feet with affectionate purrs as he dished up.

“Traitor,” I muttered under my breath. I had meant it for Cat, her allegiances turning at the twist of a can opener, but I saw him freeze, muscles tensed at the curse. “Her, not you,” I hastily added. 

But the damage was done. I could see it in the lines of his shoulders. I tried for a change of subject. “I didn’t know I had a tagine.”

He gave me flat look, head cocked and eyebrow lifted. “You don’t know what’s in your own kitchen?”

I missed the kohl he use to wear too, accentuate the warm darkness of his eyes. They seemed smaller and less expressive without it. Like seeing someone without their spectacles. 

“I don’t cook much,” I shrugged, trying not to sound as useless as I felt. “The flat came furnished.”

“Ah.” He went on with his cooking. “I wondered. It’s–” he gestured vaguely around my cluttered flat, “a lot of stuff.” 

Changing lives every seven years meant traveling light. Being willing to leave almost everything behind. Beyond practical necessities, possessions became road markers to memory. The value of objects were in their associations. To place, to time, to event, the person you were with and how you felt with them. Holding onto them was a way to keep those memories close, breathing life into the past. Memories made manifest.

But with so many years, the manifestations of memory begin to become anchors, chaining me in the past. It took time to learn to let go. To accept that memories had to be kept light in order to be kept at all. Storing and sorting them instead by Roman method of _loci_. 

He nodded to the small table, strewn with the detritus of my research. It must have been obvious to him how infrequently I sat down to eat. I shuffled things away, tucking stray slips of paper and scribbled notes between pages. Less loci, more chaos theory.

“It’s… cosy.”

I snorted as I tucked the books on a shelf. “That’s American polite for small.”

He passed me a plate. Modern Persian shakshouka, thick with spice and topped with eggs. The scent invoking the markets of Constantinople and the last time I’d seen him. 

“I know it’s small but it’s what I can afford,” I huffed, aware I was reddening. 

“Are you–” He gave me a worried look. “Do you need money?” 

“I have enough.” I shrugged placatingly.

“Because you know, if you ever need–”

I cut him off with a look. “How would I know how to reach you? Even if I did need anything?” It came out much sharper than expected. Or maybe just as sharply as I meant it. “I haven’t seen you in a thousand years.” 

He put his fork down slowly, deliberately, licking his lips in that way he did when he was carefully framing his words. “The same way I find you.” He reached across the small table, taking my hand. He ran his long fingers over the inside of my wrist, brushing the battered silver band that held my golden shard to rest over the point of my pulse. “This. It will always lead you to me. Just as it leads me to you.”

A thousand years and his touch made my heart flutter, eyes growing heavy. His skin was always so warm, as if he ran hotter than everyone else. I felt my breathing deepening, easing into the warmth and familiar comfort of his presence as our hearts found each other’s rhythms. 

I wanted to hold him. To crawl back into bed, pulling him with me. I wanted to wrap myself in him.

To go back to how it was before. 

Before I… 

Before he…

I pulled away, forcing myself to separate. To become just me again. 

“So, America?” It was reaching but I needed a change of topic. Anything to distance myself from the longing. “Where?” I stuffed a forkful of egg in my mouth, forcing him to carry the conversation.

“California,” he answered naturally, as if he hadn’t just felt it too. The magnetic pull between us. “Silicon Valley.”

I cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Hey!” he laughed. “It suited me. Your superpower might be languages but mine has always been numbers. Unlike you, I can’t leave myself post-it notes in cuneiform.” He gestured to my fridge and angular notations of shopping-lists. “The computer age suits me down to the ground.”

 _Superpower_. The word jarred oddly. It hadn’t existed the last time we’d spoken. But then, the language he was speaking hadn’t existed then either. “What were you doing there?”

Again, that little lick of the lips. The moment of thought and consideration I’d lacked all those years ago. “Facial recognition software,” he admitted softly. 

I heard my fork clatter to the table, slipping from my hand. “What! Why?” It was the reason I avoided London these days. The constant surveillance. For most people the myriad mechanical eyes were nothing more than an abstract but I was exactly the racial profile they claimed they weren’t tracking. Not to mention the fact I don’t age.

“Because you can’t beat what you don’t understand,” he pointed out sharply. “I needed to see the algorithms they’re using. Get a peek behind the curtain.” He put his own fork down. “Only way to keep us safe.”

Always _we_ with him. Always _us_. I’d tried to put him out of my head but he’d been planning for the future. Our future. 

“There’s only so much longer we’re going to be able to survive on forged passports and IDs. Sooner or later, someone’s going to spot a pattern. And I can’t let that happen.” He lowered his eyes. “I can’t bear to see another government take you away. Not if I could stop it. They won’t just kill you this time.”

I was in his arms and kissing him before I was aware I’d moved, tasting coffee and paprika on his lips. 

For a moment he kissed me back but then his hands cupped my upper arms, gently separating us. “No. Not here. Not yet.” 

He sounded so sad, so raw. I pushed closer, trying to kiss him again. Just to stop him from speaking. I didn’t want to hear him sound like that.

But he held me tight, eyes lowered. “It’s too fast. We have too much history to just– If we’re going to do this, I want to do it right. Not just rush headlong back at each other.” He looked up then and I hated the wet film in his eyes. “I want your forgiveness. And I want you to want mine. But I can’t pretend none of it ever happened. I know that’s what we did last time but it only made things worse.”

I wanted to pull away. I wanted to rage. I wanted to kiss him harder and stop him talking. I wanted to walk away and never see him again. I wanted to hold him till the end of time. 

But not listening to him was how we’d ended up like this. 

I backed off a step, pacing the tiny room. I felt him move to follow me but force himself to stillness, the tension ratcheting through us both. 

“I don’t know how to do this,” I admitted, the words coming out almost as a growl. “I don’t know where to start.”

“I’m staying at the motel on the high street. How about dinner tonight? You can show me around the city.” 

“Are you asking me out on a date?” Incredulity making my voice high.

He chuckled, looking abashed. “I guess I am.” 

“I’m working.” It was defensive and unnecessary, and slightly untrue. I needed to tidy up the office, make sure all the significant finds were locked away for the holidays. But that wouldn’t take me long. “You could pick me up there. Meet me at the university?” 

“I’d like that.” He smiled softly. Steadying the plate I’d almost knocked over in my haste to kiss him, he started clearing up.

“Leave that, I’ll do it.”

He gave me a slightly sceptical look but left the plate by the sink, setting the tagine to soak. 

With some chagrin I realised how much of a mess the kitchen had been when he arrived. How much cleaning he’d done just to be able to cook breakfast. 

But he said nothing. Five and a half thousand years and he was still cleaning up after me.

“Six pm at your office?” He asked, folding his coat over his arm.

“Do you need the address?”

He shook his head and took my business card out of a pocket, my office address and number printed on one side, my home address scribbled on the other in Professor Cline’s fussy cursive. At least that solved the mystery of how I got home. 

“Six it is.” I considered kissing him again. Or trying anyway. But it had been an unwise impulse before, done for the wrong reasons. Kissing him goodbye felt like compounding my folly.

He seemed to sense it and touched the brim of his hat as he tipped it on, letting himself out.

I sat down heavily, head in hands and sighed. Cat jumped up onto the table and head-butted me, voicing some rumbling of an opinion. 

“I suppose you think I’m a fool too?” I asked her.

Her answer, if any, was lost in a slithering sound as she liberated an egg from my half-eaten breakfast and dragged it onto the floor. 

***

I realised, some hours later, what had driven me to go to work. It was Christmas Eve and there was almost no-one left on campus, let alone in the office. But surrounded by the book scented clutter of the department’s offices, I realised I’d come back here to be Jon. 

Jon Omir was a quiet soul; a little scruffy, absent minded and likable. Not as organised as he’d like to be but reliable when it came to it. Jon had a knack for languages, which was useful with translations but also for ordering food and asking directions when they got caught short on digs. He was good in a trench and didn’t mind spending hours doing paperwork afterwards. 

Jon couldn’t make coffee to save his soul but did a halfway decent cup of tea. (Not that anyone on the department preference in tea could be considered decent. Stewed for a week in a workman’s boot seemed to be the norm.) 

Jon enjoyed listening to people’s stories and was always good for a shoulder to cry on when the PhD students started to crack under pressure. 

Jon was unthreatening, uncomplicated, single and happy living with a cat who sometimes rode to the office in the basket of his bicycle and fell asleep on the bookshelves. 

Jon wore comfortable charity store clothes and chewed his nails. Jon’s hair was a touch longer than fashionable because he was forever forgetting to get it cut. He didn’t have a beard so much as a three-day old five o’clock shadow. 

Jon did not have complicated ex, or millennia of baggage. Jon was not impulsive or reckless. 

Those traits had belonged to another man. Another life. 

I’d had more names than I could count. Some of them I’d forgotten entirely. Some I reused after a lifetime had passed. I liked Jon, I liked being him.

There was that one name I’d never used again, a version of me I’d tried to close the door on. 

And yet, as soon as Jude was back in my life; everything I was, everything I’d done, came flooding back. 

Was it the same for him? Was Judas still there under Jude’s American accent and perfect nails? He’d been impulsive too, a temper that would rise… but in hindsight, most often rose to match mine. 

We had both been kids in our own way, prone to the same thrill-seeking and risk-taking behaviours of any teenager. Drunk on our own invincibility. 

Had he always been little more mature, even then? He foresaw the consequences of my game long before I did. But at the time it had been fun; our little gang, playing at politics and causing trouble. I didn’t want to hear his doubts, his Cassandraic warnings. 

It’s funny, for all the iterations and reimaginations of that time, the closest I’ve seen come to the truth is a musical. I half wondered if he’d had a hand in it, the first time I heard the lyrics. His voice as clear in it as the day he’d taken me aside and tried to get me to stop.

_I am frightened by the crowd, for we are getting much too loud. And they’ll crush us if we go too far._

And he’d been right. We’d gone too far. _I’d_ gone too far. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, see it. Drunk on my own power-trip.

He’d led them to me, let them take me, knowing I could endure it. 

Knowing the others couldn’t. 

He sacrificed me on the altar of my own stupidity, to save the lives of our friends. And in doing so, cemented the legend.

Between us, we ruined the world. 

“Penny for your thoughts?”

I was so startled I nearly fell out of my chair. “Professor Amund.” I clutched my chest, willing my racing heart to slow down. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you were in today.”

“I’m the one who should be apologising, lad,” he chuckled. “Didn’t mean to make you jump out of your skin. Only you’ve been staring off into space like a wax figure since I got here. Something amiss?”

I felt myself flush, ducking my head. “Nothing, just lost in thought.”

“Lost in memory, more like. I know that look.” He lowered himself into the chair on the other side of my crowded desk with the care of old age. A care I’ll never know. “What’s on your mind, lad?”

I’d gotten better at reading people, or I’d tried to at least. And I could tell something was wrong. “Professor–”

“Please, you are allowed to call me David, you know.”

“David.” I managed a small nod. “Is everything alright? Only I though you and your wife were heading to France this morning.” He wasn’t dressed for travel. He was a man who dressed to the occasion. An old school gentleman who took pride in his appearance in a way the next generation’s metrosexuals hadn’t realised they were emulating. 

His greying red hair was unbrushed, his cheek stubbled. The red rims to his eyes had nothing at all to do with the one drink he’d had the night before. 

“Mary’s a bit poorly this morning. Thought it best to leave off the trip till she’s well.”

Doctor Mary Amund, David’s wife of forty years, had stage four cancer. She wasn’t going to be well again and David knew it. But for him, it didn’t do to blub. Stiff upper lip and all that. 

“I hope she feel better soon,” I offered, because the best I could do for him was to uphold the lie for form’s sake. “Please pass on my regards.”

“Will do, lad. Very kind.” He nodded and shuffled uncomfortably, shifting the focus away, “But you didn’t answer my question. What’s got you dallying down memory lane? That young man of yours?”

“Jude isn’t–” I wanted to defect but knew I couldn’t. For his sake more than mine. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“I take it you have history?”

I huffed a laugh. “You could say that. We were together for a while but we fell out badly. We tried to make another go of it but… There are things that are hard to get past.”

“And yet, he’s here. Come all the way across the pond with you in mind.”

“That he is.”

“I take it your families don’t approve?”

I ducked my head, letting my silence answer what I couldn’t. Neither of us had family that we knew of. If we had, all memory of them left us in the crater. 

“You’re in England now, lad. And in a time when you can walk down the street holding hands and no bastard’s got the right to stop you.” His voice grew uncharacteristically soft. “Not everyone was so lucky.”

There was a depth to those words, a scar kept well hidden. “David?”

He huffed and leant back in the chair, looking up at the sagging ceiling with its patina of water stains. “I’ve never told anyone this, save Mary who I’ve never lied to. When I was younger than you,” (or at least my apparent age of 22) “I… stepped out with a boy from the next village. Alick. You never did meet a more bonnie lad.” His faded Hebridean accent grew thick with the memory. “Eyes the colour of the sea before a storm. We use to sneak off to go fishing. Though we never caught trout nor salmon to show for it.”

I let the silence fill the space, letting him take his time to remember what I imagine was his first love. 

“Anyway, we got caught out, tumbling in the heather. My da beat me bloody for it and dragged me to the church to have the priest put the fear of the Almighty in me.”

I tried to suppress a wince. “Did you ever see him again?”

He shook his head. “Not a peep. I doubt he fared better at his father’s hands. Hard men, both of them. And fond of the belt.” He sighed deeply, “No, as soon as I was presentable again, my da dragged me back to the Church and I was introduced to Mary. She was in trouble of her own, having been seen talking with an English boy, back when things like that mattered. Our families fixed us up to keep us both quiet and set us right.”

“I would never have picked yours as an arranged marriage,” I caught myself saying. I’d never heard him speak of Mary with anything but love. 

“Arranged it might have been, but one that suited us both. There might not have been love at the altar but it grew fast and fierce soon after. As far as my family were concerned, I was cured of my… disturbance. See, lad, back then and that far out, we’d didn’t have words for _bisexual_ or any of that. If you were bent, they whipped you for it till you straightened back out.”

“I take it you never _straightened_?” I asked, smiling softly. 

“I love my Mary, and will till my dying day. She took me for who I am and never asked me to change. That’s why it does my heart good to see you and that handsome young man so open with each other. A lot of people stood up and pushed back so you could have that. I wish I could say I was one of them but I wasn’t so brave. I hope you’ll be brave for me.”

I rose as he did, holding a hand out to him. “Thank you, David. That means a lot to me.” 

He took it, covering my hand with his. “Merry Christmas, lad. Now be off with you. Life’s for the living.”

“I’ll just lock up here,” I promised, watching him go.

I’d lived through the Greek and Roman eras, seen cycles of sexual norms come and go. I’d felt a stab of guilt every time that one damn line from that mess of a book was quoted to justify hatred. 

I can tell you now, I never said that, that rubbish about men laying with men being an abomination. Never said anything of the kind. My little cabal of followers were as liberated as the flower-children, a revolution long before it revolved again. Too much so sometimes. I had to remind a couple of them that “Love thy neighbour” was not meant as a licence to the licentious. 

I’d never been afraid of my attractions, to men and women and every shade of gender that time and place could bring. I’d taken lovers in the years since the cross, our affairs perforce brief. 

But I’d only loved, truly loved, once.

Snow dusted the brim of the charcoal grey trilby he somehow managed not to look ironic in. 

“Be brave,” I reminded myself, stepping out of my office to meet him. “Life is for the living.”


End file.
